Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2018/1045

MPC Joins the Dark Side

John Cartlidge and Nigel P. Smart and Younes Talibi Alaoui

Abstract: We consider the issue of securing dark pools/markets in the financial services sector. These markets currently are executed via trusted third parties, leading to potential fraud being able to be conducted by the market operators. We present a potential solution to this problem by using Multi-Party Computation to enable a trusted third party to be emulated in software. Our experiments show that whilst the standard market clearing mechanism of Continuous Double Auction in lit markets is
not currently viable when executed using MPC, a popular mechanism for evaluating dark markets, namely the volume matching methodology, is viable. We present experimental validation of this conclusion by presenting the expected throughputs for such markets in two popular MPC paradigms; namely the two party dishonest majority setting and the honest majority three party setting.